The New “Crisis” Power Grab

April 13, 2020

Apr 13, 2020 (Raleigh) Just last week, the entire nation watched as Wisconsin was one SCOTUS vote away from allowing their Governor Toney Evers to legalize statewide ballot harvesting “just this once,” in the name of the Corona Virus, but North Carolina’s Board of Elections thinks they’ve devised a way to avoid Evers’ same mistake.

There’s an April 20th deadline for public comments on Bell’s proposed changes that add “other public health incident” language to the excuses she has for exerting emergency powers. All she will need is for her boss, Gov. Cooper, to declare it, “hazardous for elections officials or voters to reach . . . the voting place or . . . [any] risk of physical harm to persons in the voting place.”

While this all seems reasonable on its face, but we’ve dealt long enough with schemers in both parties to fear the devil in the details.

Reminding them of who they serve.

Legislative leadership has already signaled concerns about what might happen if North Carolina loosens its laws on mail voting, or grants this excessive power to the Director of the NC BOE, but nationwide media barrages make it too easy for a few McCaniac Republicans to craft a “bipartisan” agreement with the Democrats and “temporarily” destroy our state’s two-party system.

Keep a sharp lookout for any lawmakers who admired this guy’s style.

This is why concerned citizens need to fight this power grab on two fronts: your elected lawmakers and the SBOE’s public comment page. Since you had the brains to find our webpage, you probably already know how to reach your Statehouse Reps and State Senators, but the NCAC public-comment page is another matter.

While we like people sounding off, it’s not good if all the “advice” comes from people trying to make it easier to steal elections. So, here are a few ideas we might suggest the lawmakers consider:

Preemptively bar the Governor from exceeding the bounds of our current absentee-voting laws, as spelled out in NCGS §163 Article 20.

Since Democrats want the SBOE to mail out ballots to all registered voters, offer to fund an Ohio-type solution in exchange for reforms to help prune voters from our morbidly obese voter rolls. Besides inviting costly litigation, those inefficient voter lists already drive up the cost of campaigns that send mail to registered voters. So, here are some of our suggested changes:

Modify the absentee ballot request form to “require” either an identification number issued by the NC DMV or the voter’s SSN4. Current federal law makes those numbers optional on the voter registration application but does not address absentee ballot request forms.

Require a sworn statement from any voters who claim not to have either of those numbers.

While we’re at it, make such voters state their true “domicile” address in North Carolina and swear that it’s theirs. We’ve seen voters use ancient addresses to “vote where it counts” (in NC instead of NY). We’ve also seen mountains of voter records with illegal addresses listed in both their “residential” address field and the “mailing address” field. This is supposedly illegal, but election officials don’t enforce that part of the law.

On that note, no election safeguards are enforceable if election officials refuse to follow the law. For that reason, the Legislature should increase the public access to those records and increase the penalties for election officials who resist transparency.

Don’t leave the DMV out of any new oversight laws, since they continually take more and more responsibility for fattening up the voter rolls and then hide behind a 1994 law to keep their mischief shrouded in secrecy. There’s even federal litigation against NC over their shameful practices and taxpayers are footing the bill to uphold them.